Winter Storm and Texas Weather: Live Updates of Power Outages, Lack of Water and More
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Here’s what you need to know:
The lack of power and safe water for millions of people in Texas may be compounded on Thursday by a band of foul weather stretching from the Rio Grande to New York.
Days of glacial weather have left at least 38 people dead nationwide, made many roads impassable, disrupted vaccine distribution and blanketed nearly three-quarters of the continental United States in snow.
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas warned residents to brace for continued misery.
“Most of the state will be below freezing,” Mr. Abbott said in a media briefing on Wednesday, adding that a respite from the cold snap would come only on Saturday.
The storm forced the postponement of a planned trip by President Biden on Thursday to a Pfizer facility in Michigan that produces the coronavirus vaccine.
“It’s going to be a mess,” Laura Pagano, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said of the storm, which was expected to extend from the Plains to the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast.
Several inches of snow and sleet were forecast for the Washington area. Duke Energy warned its customers in the Carolinas that there could be a million power outages in the days ahead, and Maryland’s governor, Larry Hogan, gave a similar warning, telling residents to keep their phones charged and to prepare themselves for the coming snow and ice.
Several inches of snow were expected in the New York City area, where Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Wednesday that the weather had delayed shipments of coronavirus vaccine doses and prevented officials from scheduling more than 30,000 vaccination appointments, complicating a rollout already constrained by a limited supply of doses.
But the loss of power was perhaps the most brutal consequence of the storm. Early Thursday at least one million customers nationwide were without power, the overwhelming majority of them in Texas, according to Bluefire Studios, a company that tracks outages.
Crucial infrastructure in Texas was failing even as the state’s grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, said power had been restored to 1.6 million households on Wednesday.
Water has also emerged as a major problem, with almost seven million Texans under a boil water advisory, including the cities of Austin and Houston. About 263,000 people were affected by nonfunctioning water providers.
Hospital officials at St. David’s South Austin Medical Center scrambled on Wednesday night to fix a heating system that was failing because of low water pressure. They were forced to seek portable toilets and distribute bottles of water to patients and employees so they could wash their hands.
Catherine Saenz and her family, like most of their neighbors in Houston, have had no power or water for days, as the city remains in the grip of the fiercest winter in memory. But they are fortunate: They have a fireplace.
Even fireplaces have to be fed, though, and to keep the two parents, two daughters and two grandmothers from freezing, her husband has spent hours in the afternoon scouring the neighborhood for fallen trees and rotten wood.
“I never imagined that we would be in this situation,” said Ms. Saenz, who grew up in Colombia but has lived in Houston through Hurricanes Ike and Harvey. “No one is prepared, it is dangerous and we are very vulnerable.”
During a news conference on Wednesday, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, said, “Every source of power that the state of Texas has has been compromised.”
He signed an executive order directing natural gas providers to halt all shipments of gas outside the state, ordering them to instead direct those sales to Texas power generators.
W. Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, said several state agencies have been working together to meet the demands of nursing homes, hospitals and dialysis centers, which have reported a variety of problems including water main breaks and oxygen shortages. As another storm moves in, the state increased the number of warming centers to more than 300.
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FEMA Sending Relief to Texas
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is sending generators and other supplies to Texas to help the state cope with power outages after a severe winter storm, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said.
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Our team and FEMA continue to monitor the situation in Texas, as well as other states in the storm’s path that might be impacted. We remain in close contact with states across the affected area to ensure any federal support requirements are met. FEMA has supplied generators to Texas and is preparing to move diesel into the state to ensure the continued availability of backup power, which of course is a major issue on the ground to key critical infrastructure, including communications, hospitals and water. FEMA’s also supplying Texas with water and blankets at their request. We are preparing to quickly process requests from other states for emergency assistance. That’s how the process typically works. And we urge people in the affected states to, of course, listen to their emergency management, management officials.
In a sign of just how fundamental the needs are in Texas, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has sent blankets, bottled water and meals, in addition to 60 generators, to help the state power “critical infrastructure” like hospitals. FEMA will also provide the state with diesel fuel “to ensure the continued availability of backup power,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said at a briefing on Wednesday.
As his state was racked with a huge electricity blackout crisis that left millions of people without heat in frigid temperatures, the governor of Texas took to the television airwaves to start placing blame.
His main target was renewable energy, suggesting that when wind and solar power failed, it led to a systemwide collapse.
“It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary for the state of Texas as well as other states to make sure we will be able to heat our homes in the winter times and cool our homes in the summer times,” said Gov. Greg Abbott, speaking on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News. Other conservative talk-show hosts had already picked up the theme.
However, wind power was not chiefly to blame for the Texas blackouts. The main problem was frigid temperatures that stalled natural gas production, which is responsible for the majority of Texas’ power supply. Wind makes up just a small fraction — 7 percent or so, by some estimates — of the state’s overall mix of power generation
As frigid weather grips the center of the nation, causing widespread power outages, freezing temperatures, slippery roads and weather-related deaths, Mr. Abbott’s voice was among the most prominent in a chorus of political figures this week to quickly assert that green energy sources such as wind and solar were contributing to the blackouts. The talking points, coming largely from conservatives, reinvigorated a long-running campaign to claim that emissions-spewing fossil fuels are too valuable a resource to give up.
The efforts came despite the fact that the burning of fossil fuels — which causes climate change by releasing vast amounts of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere — is helping to drive the phenomenon of increasingly dangerous hurricanes and other storms, as well as unusual weather patterns.
Winter storm warnings and advisories are in place for parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut from Thursday morning through Friday night, with several inches of snow expected in New York City and on Long Island, said Jay Engle, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
Recent storms buried the city in snow, but Mr. Engle described the coming weather as “not as intense, but enough to make travel difficult.”
Winds will be moderate, reaching 25 miles per hour on Thursday night. Three to five inches of snow was expected across the five boroughs and Long Island through Thursday, with total amounts reaching up to eight inches by Friday, according to the Weather Service.
Parts of upstate New York will see only a few inches of snow: Albany may receive up to three inches and Poughkeepsie six inches, the service said.
A warning issued for the northeastern region of New Jersey, including parts of Essex, Union, Passaic and Bergen Counties, projected up to seven inches of snow. A similar advisory was put in place for southern Connecticut, including parts of Middlesex, New Haven and New London, where several inches of snow was expected through Thursday.
Travel conditions across these areas were expected to be hazardous into Friday, the Weather Service said.